To Love And To Be Loved
by whoome
Summary: The end is near, and Elena finds herself unable to choose between the brothers she loves. As time passes, she learns more and more about the real nature of her relationship with Stefan and Damon and realizes what it means to truly love someone. Oneshot!


Elena lies in her bed, waiting for the ceiling to come crashing down on her head, for the world to collapse, for the sky to fall and bury her deep in the ground, but no matter how much she anticipates the end, nothing happens. Instead, her skin still stings in all the places it came to contact with Damon's hands, Damon's chest, Damon's hair, and she still can't shake the faint, languorous feeling in her bruised lips. Remorse and guilt overcome her in constant waves, and she only finds solace in burying her face deep in the pillows and shaking it vigorously, as if trying to get rid of the memory for ever.

_It never happened_, she tells herself in a last coherent thought before she drifts off for good and enters her dreams full of dark faces, strong hands and painful kisses.

* * *

When Elena can't look Stefan in the eye, she does the only thing she can think of to cover the guilt written all over her face and suggests they go to the decade dance together. Stefan lightens up, happily agrees and as hope flickers through his eyes, Elena realizes how horrifyingly he's misreading her actions. The invitation says _let's start over, I'm sure of how I feel now._ It says _there's a chance for us, Stefan_. It definitely doesn't say _I was pinned against a wall by your brother while he successively took away every breath from my lungs._

Whatever hope that decade dance gives to Stefan, it takes it away from Damon. Elena knows he knows by the way she wants to bury herself alive under his gaze. Elena also knows Stefan doesn't know by the way he smiles at her without any good reason, just like he used to before Klaus. By the day of the dance she can't stand the presence of either of them.

* * *

_How did I get here?_ Elena contemplates while she's dancing with Stefan, his warm embrace reminding her of the times before everything got so complicated. Back then, of course, she felt as if her life was ending, everything was falling apart, but now she finds herself longing for the problems they had to face. _Maybe a day will come when I will miss the problems I have know_, she wonders, and immediately dreads that thought.

Stefan pulls her closer as the slow jazz song encompasses everybody on the dance floor, and Elena buries her face in his suit the way she buries it in her pillows every night, slightly shaking her head. There is no Damon in that dance, the way there was no Stefan in that motel. But once she gets home and lies in her empty bed both of them will be everywhere, so Elena dances on, deciding never to stop moving.

Soon enough she has to, though, because Rebekah and Alaric decide to step in, and just as a bloodbath is about to ensue, Elena once again finds the lives of everyone she loves at stake. So she plans, she runs, she hides, she helps, she screams, and once all of it is over, she just slides down the wall of her high school hallway, her torn dress covered in Jamie's blood. Bonnie is weeping over his dead body a few feet away, but Elena can't find any words of solace, so instead she just leans her head back against the wall and sits there until Damon scoops her off the floor and drives her to her house. As they pull over in her driveway she prepares to jump out of the car and run from any kind of discussion he might want to have, but Damon's quicker.

"I thought after what happened in Colorado I at least would get to hear it from you," he says quietly. Elena just shuts her eyes and shakes her head, the memories of certain grasps and deep moans resurfacing before her eyes.

Damon's waiting for a reply, but she can't give him one, so instead she says, "There is death around me."

"Bonnie will be fine," Damon replies, even though they both know she won't , as they all saw something break in her tonight. Elena chooses not to remember it.

"There is death around me, and you expect me to pick one of you," she continues, still avoiding Damon's stern gaze. "But if I'm picking one of you, I'm picking life with one of you, and how can I pick life when there is death around me?"

He doesn't say anything else while she crawls out of the car and into her house.

* * *

The aftermath of the decade dance finds everyone dreading the next day. They all come together to agree upon the unthinkable, and once it's decided, Elena can feel the death tighten its embrace around her. Damon tactfully restrains himself from coming into any contact with her, and it doesn't take Stefan long to realize that for now it's the best, if not only, way. So she sits back and lets them decide – didn't they always? – and watches as they work on their plans, and search for spells with Bonnie, and finds herself thinking, _I want you both. I can't choose, and I can't have neither, so it has to be both._

Klaus is back to continue his trip across the country, but he needs his living blood bank for that, so they have one more issue to struggle with. Stefan and Damon almost draw blood fighting over how to protect her, and only Bonnie says what Elena has been thinking all this time, which is _just let him have her. Can't kill him since you all descend from him, can't take her away without provoking him to go on a killing binge, just let him have her._ Despite the reason behind these words, the newfound hate Bonnie feels for Elena still occasionally pangs.

Of course they would never just let him have her, and Damon even goes as far as to kick Bonnie out of the house. So Elena just goes back home, lies in her bed and traces back to that rough wall opposite their motel room in Colorado.

* * *

"I will leave," Stefan says quietly, cupping her face with both his hands. "I will leave town, because it would be excruciating for me to see you with him. Same goes for Damon, so he promised to leave town, too. Whoever you choose, Elena, the other will step down."

"You should be mad at me."

"What for? Falling in love with Damon? Making me sit back and watch as you weigh your options?"

It still amazes her how he knows her every thought even before she does. He leans forward and kisses her, and feeling his lips on hers after what seems like a lifetime of missing every part of him brings tears to her eyes.

"There is death around me," she mutter when he breaks the kiss to draw a breath. They both lapse into silence for a while, and then he replies:

"That's why you need to hang on to whatever life you can have, Elena."

That night she falls asleep a little easier, her head gently propped against her bent elbows.

* * *

When the unthinkable happens, Elena can't really believe it did. They've all talked about it, planned it, tried to find a way around it, but once Alaric lays dead with his neck unnaturally bent, his fingers bare of any rings, they all know it was the only way. Damon kneels on the ground close to Ric's body with an expressionless face and slight trembling in his fingers. Elena knows he never realized how much this friendship meant to him until he found himself unable to snap Alaric's neck, so she shoots Stefan a thankful glance. His fingers are trembling too, but for a very different reason.

This time Elena is the one scooping Damon off the ground. She can't really carry him, but she can prop him up and let him lean against her as she leads him towards the car. She feels needed, so she acts needed; she sits him on the couch in his living room, pours him a drink, and then stays with him until Stefan comes back, slightly nodding his head at her.

She can feel Damon's eyes fixed on her, and for a second she takes in the room – her and them, the way for some mysterious reason it was always meant to be. All loving each other beyond words, none being able to live without the others.

She feels needed, so she acts needed. "No sacrifices," she says sternly. "Not this time. We can't kill him without killing you, so we don't kill him. We trap him. We make him run. We get Bonnie to turn him into a forest rabbit, for all I care. But nobody dies."

Of course, somebody dies.

* * *

She wasn't supposed to come back. Bonnie cast a spell that made Esther leave Rebekah's body, so nobody understands how she managed her way back, but she did. And as she did, all hell broke loose.

They retrieved seven stakes. In the middle of the forest, where it seems everything will come to an end, either one way or another, Elena crouches against a tree, clutching one stake in her muddy, sweaty palm. She can see Kol quickly burning with another one deep in his heart. Elijah disappeared a while ago, and Elena suspects he never really decided whose side he was on, so he just vanished. Klaus is trapped, and so the only one left on the field is Rebekah, who is clearly suffering from multiple personality disorder, with Esther repeatedly resurfacing. _Kill her_, Elena begs in her mind. _Kill her before she kills Klaus_.

She wants to join the fight, however pointless it should be for her as a human, but her stake-free hand is wrapped around Bonnie's open wound and she refuses to let go, even if she can see the pool of blood is disturbingly big and Bonnie hasn't regained consciousness in a while.

Then a shriek disrupts the air and Elena shoots a hopeful glance at the fighting figures, because she recognizes the voice to be Rebekah's – and then her heart stops, her blood freezes in her veins, her eyes widen in horror and she doesn't even remember letting go of Bonnie, letting go of the stake, letting go of her fear, she just knows she managed to stumble to her feet and now she's running frantically towards Damon, who slightly staggers and takes a hesitant step back, looking down at the wooden stake sticking from his chest.

He attacked her. She staked him. He attacked her. She staked him. Elena's a few yards away, a few feet away, Damon's already on his knees.

She reaches him just as he falls to the ground.

"Damon!" she shrieks, clutching his leather jacket and giving him a brutal shake. "Damon!"

He looks at her with his eyes suddenly gray, not blue, and she decides to be strong for him. He won't die seeing her in tears, in hysteria, in desperation. She's too petrified to cry anyway, so she reaches for his hand, squeezes it as hard as she can and tells him she loves him, because only now, when it can't change anything, she finds the courage to try and let it change everything. Damon whispers something to her, probably that he loves her too, so she leans forward, determined not to let herself take her eyes off of his face, waiting for his dry veins to bulge through the graying skin.

"Not dead" he barely repeats, forcing every word out. It takes Elena a lifetime to realize what he's saying, and even then she can't seem to understand the meaning of his words. Finally she slowly pulls at the stake, and when Damon starts writhing in pain, it finally hits her. They dipped the stakes in vervain, just for good measure, because they needed all the help they could get when going against four Originals, and Rebekah must have missed Damon's heart only by an inch, which means there's poison spreading right next to it in his open chest.

All of this goes through Elena's mind like a flash of lightening and then she props herself up and decidedly tugs at the stake, suddenly terrified that she might incidentally push it into Damon's heart. But then the stake comes out, dripping with dark red blood and some other goo Elena doesn't want to recognize, and Damon is breathing heavily, noisily and with great deal of effort, but he's breathing, and that's when Elena realizes she's crying.

Soon after that, it's over. Raging Stefan holds Rebekah in place while Caroline kills her with a merciless look in her big, beautiful eyes. Rebekah drops to the ground, and is soon devoured by flames.

It's like there never was a fight. The Originals don't leave behind nothing but dust, and if it wasn't for Bonnie's motionless body and Matt's extensive injuries Elena wouldn't be sure if any of it actually happened.

With Klaus deep in the tomb, held there by Bonnie's last spell, they feel unusually calm as they return to the city, battered, bloodied, barely conscious. Just the way they feel unusually calm as they return to their everyday lives. They mourn Bonnie, mourn Alaric, watch over slowly recovering Matt, but it all seems surreal, until at some point it starts feeling more and more real.

* * *

Elena gets better. She cries a lot, but decides that crying is good. She wakes up, makes Jeremy some breakfast and then goes on a walk. Talks to Caroline, talks to Matt. They all failed their senior year, obviously, so they're just enjoying a beautiful spring.

She doesn't see much of Stefan or Damon. They're both still in town – she catches glimpses of them from time to time, hear that they check up on Abby, who Elena still can't face. But never on her. When they do bump into each other, they don't talk about anything relevant.

Until one day there's a knock on the door, and Stefan is standing on her porch, and Elena immediately knows he's leaving.

"The bag's in my car," he says, because he always knows what she's thinking. Elena shakes her head and quickly wraps her arms around him.

"I love you," she says solemnly.

"I know."

"Don't leave."

"Somebody has to."

She pulls back to look him in the eye and suddenly understands everything there is to understands about the three of them. It's not about who loves more, who proves it more, who needs it more. She can't choose because you can't be forced to pick what part of your body you want ripped out. If Stefan didn't leave today, Damon might do it tomorrow, or they could both decide to move away in a week. In the end, it didn't matter.

As Stefan pulls out of her driveway, Elena wonders if he just wants her to save Damon. He might feel like he owes it to him, or maybe he just wants him to love and be loved. Either way, as she cries that night in bed, she knows she'd weep just as hard if it was Damon on the road right now.

* * *

But it's not. Damon is still living in Mystic Falls, and a week later, when Elena gathers the courage to go and see him, he seems like his same old self; except his not, because once again he had to part with his brother, and she can't believe she's the very reason for that. But just like Elena, he seems to understand.

Rebuilding your life is easier with someone around. So now they both go see Caroline, and Matt, and eventually Abby, with who Elena cries so hard she feels her heart break into the smallest pieces possible. And the next day Damon does his best to glue them back together, because he takes her to a firework show over a nearby lake. Elena watches it in amazement, having long forgotten what it's like to be amazed by something, and when his arm finds its way around her shoulders, she feels that they have finally become friends.

* * *

At some point, though, his arms are not just arms of a friend, and she finds herself trying to remember the bruising effect his lips had on hers, the very memory she once struggled to get rid of. But their crazy, desperate kiss in Colorado seems a lifetime away, and when they do finally kiss, sitting on the floor of her living room, crouched over some old photos she wanted to look through, it's as if they have never kissed before. Damon isn't hesitant – Elena isn't sure if he's capable of being hesitant when it comes to women – but it doesn't remind her of any of the stolen moments she shared with him in that previous life. He deepens the kiss and slowly lays her flat on the floor, scattering the pictures of her chubby, seven-year-old face all around them. As Elena pulls him on top of her, she feels like a teenager making out with her boyfriend while her parents are out of home.

* * *

One day, he teases her that it took a stake through his chest for her to realize that she loves him. Later that night, when Elena lies awake in his enormous bed, feeling his hair tickle her bare shoulder with every breath he takes, she thinks _no, Damon, it took a stake through your chest for Stefan to realize how much he loves you._ She misses him, but she misses a lot of things that used to be in her life, and like with everything else, Damon's presence seems to mend all the holes.

It won't forever. They both know they might have no future together, with her mortality, the threat of Klaus finding a way to get out of the tomb, and the never mentioned influence Stefan's departure had on both of them, but right now, getting to love and be loved every day is more than enough.


End file.
